THE SINGERS The , widely recognized as one of the nation's foremost professional choral ensembles, have become especially well known for superb a cappella performances of choral masterworks and for expanding the cho- ral repertoire through commissions of exciting new works. The 36-voice group was founded in 1972 in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and since has developed a loyal following of millions through domestic and international tours, subscription concerts, recordings and ap- pearances on A Prairie Home Companion and St. Paul Sunday Morning. An annual holiday pro- gram, Echoes of Christmas, is heard by an estimated 7 million American Public Radio lis- teners each year. Also contributing to The Singers' popularity are national tour performances by the Dale Warland Chamber Ensemble and the Warland Cabaret Singers, a 12-member ensemble that presents jazz and show tunes. The larger Warland Symphonic Chorus reaches thousands more in performances of major choral-sym- phonic works, in collaborations with renowned orchestras and artists including Edo de Waart, David Zinman, Robert Shaw, Roger Norrington, Leonard Slatkin and Neville Marriner. With contemporary music at the core of their mission, The Singers have commissioned works by Dominick Argento, , George Shearing, Libby Larsen, William Schuman, Jalalu Kalvert-Nelson, Edwin London and many oth- ers. This commitment brought The Singers the first annual Achievement Award for Choral Excellence in 1992 and back-to-back ASCAP Awards for Adventuresome Programming in 1992 and 1993. Annual tours throughout North America, with performances in communities of all sizes, have also earned The Singers a national reputation as Minnesota's premier choral ensemble. The group has served as ambassadors for the state on three European tours and performances on German, Swedish and Finnish State Radio and Television, as well as at international choral festivals. Among The Singers' acclaimed recordings are the holiday albums A Rose in Winter, Christmas Echoes, Volumes I and II, and Carols For Christmas, as well as Choral Currents, produced in collaboration with the Minnesota Composers Forum: Americana: A Bit of Folk~ and an all-Argento album. In mid-January 1994 they released their latest recording, Fancie, featuring folk songs and choral gems by composers as varied as Rossini, Brahms, Rorem and Britten, as well as jazz selections by the Warland Cabaret Singers. Thanks to SKYWAY NEWS for promotional assistance with this concert. JERRY RUBINO Assistant Conductor and Pianist of The Dale Warland Singers, Music Director of the Warland Cabaret Singers Jerry Rubino is a versatile musician who ap- pears in many roles with The Dale Warland Singers. This season marks his sixteenth year as a member of The Singers' bass section and his twelfth as the group's official pianist. In 1983 he created the Warland Cabaret Singers, a vocal jazz ensemble of twelve singers from within the ranks of the DWS. Rubino's arrangements have become staples of the repertoire of this en- semble, which regularly appears throughout the Twin Cities and is a popular feature of The Singers' annual tour programs. Among his lat- est arrangements ~re the Bernstein songs that open this program. Rubino's music activities cover a broad range. He serves as organist and choir director of Golden Valley Methodist Church, performs with the Minnesota Opera and Minnesota Composers 'Forum and is a music director of the New Music Theater Ensemble. As one of the area's most prominent jazz pianists, Rubino is in demand as a solo performer and coordinator of special events and is well known as a featured pianist at Dayton's Minneapolis and Southdale stores. He has performed in many chamber music recitals and often serves as a choral clinician and adjudicator. Rubino, who began his professional studies as a cellist at the Curtis Institute in his native Philadelphia, went on to earn degrees in piano, music education and from Temple University and the University of Minnesota. A published arranger with Jenson, Word and Hinshaw, he was named in Who's Who is Rising Young Americans in 1989.

4 ~ DAVID MADDUX David Maddux, who arranged the Cole Porter and medleys for tonight's program, is a Seattle-based composer, choral conductor and arranger who serves as director and composer/arranger for Pro Homo Voci, a 16-voice gay and lesbian vocal ensemble, as well as composer in residence for the Seattle Gay and Lesbian Chorus. For a production initiated by Los Angeles theater mogul David Gest, Maddux recently orches- trated a new musical, Red Red Rose, based on the life of poet Robert Burns. His additional projects have ranged from scripting an all-Cole Porter revue, Swellegant Elegance, for the Seattle Men's Chorus and scoring a film, Through the Gates of Splendor, to writing lyrics and music for a musical comedy, Significant Others, and completing an original opera based on the life of William Butler Yeats. He has also arranged and produced a Grammy-nominated vocal jazz album, arranged music for the Electrical Parade at several Disney theme parks, and composed a substantial range of sacred choral and orchestral works. PHIL MATTSON Phil Mattson, arranger of the "Here's Hoagy" portion of this concert, is no stranger to Minnesota: before doing graduate work in choral literature and conducting at the University of Iowa, he completed undergraduate studies in music and philosophy at Concordia College in Moorhead. Now a faculty member at the School for Music Vocations at Southwestern Community College in Creston, Iowa, he has also taught at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington state and several other noted institutions. Among the 70-plus vocal wor~s Mattson has written and arranged are many jazz standards, including arrangements commissioned by such groups as The Four Freshmen, Chanticleer and Manhattan Transfer, for whom he did the noted arrangement of the Coleman Hawkins solo on "Body and Soul." His arrangement of "I Hear Music" was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1986. His vocal jazz group, the PM Singers, has worked with artists such as Bobby McFerrin, Richie Cole and Rob McConnell, in addition to the Spokane Symphony Orchestra under Gunther Schuller, and has received a Grammy nomination for the album Night in the City.

SANFORD MOORE Minneapolis native Sanford Moore is an arranger, pianist and composer who is well known as the founder of the vocal ensemble Moore By Four. He has an eclectic style that merges gospel, jazz and classical music elements with those of the American musical theater, and he incorporates all of these in his own compositions as well as in Moore By Four performances. For tonight's concert, in addition to displaying his considerable skills on keyboards, he arranged the medley of Harold Arlen songs. Moore's work has drawn many distinctions, including Minnesota Music Awards, Black Music Awards and jazz prizes. The groundwork for his current composing and directing was laid when he was music director for organizations including the Mixed Blood and Penumbra Theater companies.

RANDY WINKLER Randy Winkler has an extensive list of credits at area theaters. At the Chanhassen Dinner Theatres he has acted in Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, Annie and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and has choreographed a host of works ranging from Hello, Dolly! and Kiss Me, Kate to The Music Man. He has also choreographed for the Minnesota Festival Theatre, the Cricket Theater, the Illusion Theater, Actors Theater and Premiere Productions, as well as the Minnesota Orchestra's summer "Cabaret Pops" concerts, and has played a variety of roles at the Paul Bunyan Playhouse, Brass Tacks Theater and the Minnesota Opera. Winkler has directed at many of these same theaters as well as at Park Square, Theatre in the Round and Patchwork Community Theatre, and has directed or choreographed industrial shows featuring personalities such as Bob Newhart, Rita Moreno, Amy Grant and Phyllis George.

5 ~ PROGRAM NOTES every musical written after it was to be judged BY BRIAN NEWHOUSE by its standard. Thirty-seven years on, "There's a Place for Us" and "Tonight" still sound re- LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918-1990) markably fresh - especially in these new Rubino There are few introductory sentences in the arrangements. notoriously dry Grove's Dictionary of Music to The 1956 comic operetta Candide took a equal that given to Leonard Bernstein. Nor- longer road to success. Despite the panache and mally, a musician's listing there begins with a beauty of its "Glitter and be Gay" and "Make single word, like "singer" or "musicologist," then our Garden Grow," nobody - most of all come the facts. Bernstein, however, weighs in Bernstein himself - was quite happy with the with "Composer, conductor, teacher, and pia- way it turned out, so for the next decade and a nist." Subtle, but a sure sign of the unsurpassed half he hired and fired librettists, chopped depth and breadth of America's most versatile scenes, added music which he'd later delete ... mUSICIan. until 1973 it was ready to go again. Another We begin Big Band, Broadway and Blues decade passed before Candide reached the final with Bernstein the composer. His 1940s-50s version that sold out the Guthrie Theater for From "WEST SIDE STORY~ several weeks in 1989 and left critics and audi- TONIGHT ences groping for superlatives. Let's leave that Lyric by STU'Hf..' SO:oo.OHU"I "\We b~ LEO'.-\RO 8EJl"'STTJ~ o AI o to our understated friends at Grove's: "What ~I Wumly ~ ~ m ! Bernstein did above all is proclaim that an Ameri- ! i! ; I; J J j2J ~~===J=J$tit,; ..." .' can can be a remarkable and exciting musician."

HOAGY CARMICHAEL (1899-1981) Hoagy Carmichael was studying law in his ~.£.7 hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, when he W m===~r===--=-==--J r t recorded his first song. That was 1925. Shortly after, he finished the degree, moved to Florida, hung out his shingle and did his best to forget - music. But when he heard a recording of his "Washboard Blues" performed by Red Nichols he abandoned law and moved north to New York to earn his way as a songwriter. In 1929, scores are razzle-dazzle music - a mix of jazz, just 30 years old, he penned "Stardust," which blues and symphony all rolled together - and has been recorded more than 1100 times and new media of the day like TV and the lo~g-play translated into 30 languages, at last count. The record shot them straight into middle America's next two decades he collaborated with lyricists heart. Americans loved Bernstein's music, for like Mercer and here, finally, was music the way they talked and Loesser creating the way they moved - here was music for the songs we now country that won the war. recognize as the West Side Story is the perfect example. Tough essence of Big and tender, West Side is Shakespeare's antique Band; he also Romeo and Juliet sand-blasted and set in a hosted TV and concrete jungle. Shortly after its 1957 Broad- radio shows, and way premiere it was hailed as the American acted in movies music, the theater piece that wove dance, music where more of- and story together in such a propulsive way that ten than not he

6 ~ was the man at the piano singing in an easy and closed after only nine performances. The straight-ahead style. A. Wilder, in the definitive 1966 Evening Primrose with its wistful "I Re- text American Popular Song, calls Carmichael member" was one of the first and last musicals "the most talented, inventive, sophisticated, and made especially for TV; it aired once. Follies jazz-oriented of all the great craftsmen." (1971) and Company (1970) enjoyed longer runs; their respective numbers presented to- STEPHEN SONDHEIM (B. 1930) night - the softshoe "Broadway Baby" and the In Greek my- cutting "You Could Drive a Person Crazy" - thology, Athena, show Sondheim's remarkable versatility. the goddess of For anyone who loves theater, Sondheim is a the hunt, is born godsend - an artist who has more than lived up springing full- to the rich promise he showed in 1957. New grown from the York Magazine's music critic, Alan Rich, sums head of Zeus. up Sondheim as "the man who, all by himself, Most young art- restored quality and self-respect to the Ameri- ists would love can musical theater." to do the same: blast fully formed HAROLD ARLEN (1905-1 986) onto the world The son of a cantor, Harold Arlen sang in the stage and take it by storm. Few are so lucky. choir at his father's synagogue as a boy, and at One, however, was Stephen Sondheim. 15 played piano in local movie houses and on A few months after his 27th birthday he as Lake Erie excursion boats. A native of Buffalo, lyricist and Bernstein as composer opened West he took his band The Buffalodians to New York Side Story. Few at that time knew the young City in the mid-t920s and worked as a pianist man who'd penned the clever words "Every- and singer for radio, pit orchestras and dance thing's free in America, for a small fee in America" bands. His break came in 1929 when he teamed could also write music. In 1962 he wrote both with lyricist Ted Koehler and produced revues the words and music for the hilarious A Funny for the Cotton Club in Harlem - with songs like Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and has "Get Happy," "Between the Devil and the Deep followed that with a string of endlessly inven- Blue Sea," and I've Got the World on a String." tive musicals, one about every other year, that From the mid-1930s through the 1950s, with stand the conventions of romantic comedy on F't/'IfJr4 >It," II#GItt 'ic1w~ -THE 'NIZM.D OF or their ear and blur the lines between opera and OVER THE RAINBOW ly,,,, by ~icby musical. The thinking person's Broadway man, E Y UAItBURG HAROLD ARLEN MolknlflY IIlOC'_1 Sondheim writes intricate lyrics, sometimes of H hidden or double meaning, sometimes of shark- - toothed sharpness; his music always serves the words, never the other way round. Today at 63 he's just opened his latest musical, Passion, a story of a soldier whose quiet life is shattered by love - a tale Sondheim insiders find intriguingly autobiographical. For all his initial success, though, Sondheim's road hasn't been paved with unending yellow bricks. His bold 1964 Anyone Can Whistle - filled with wonderful music like the title song and "Everybody Says Don't" - baffled audiences

7 ~ lyricists Ira Gershwin and E.Y. Harburg, Arlen might be loaded with double entendres or di- gave America songs to dance and dream to, rect references to sex and drugs. Tame stuff by including "Blues in the Night," "That Old Black today's standards, but back then too racy even Magic," and "Ac-cent -tchu-ate the Positive." His for the Parisian theater. His audience tittered crowning achievement was the 1939 heart- and held its breath for the next. breaker composed for the girl from Grand For all his facility as a keyboard entertainer, ~ Rapids, Minnesota, Judy Garland: "Somewhere Porter was one of the 20th century's most thor- over the Rainbow." oughly trained songwriters, taking harmony and We think of Arlen today as one of the classic counterpoint lessons at Harvard, composition writers, an old standby. But this is too easy a and orchestration with Vincent d'Indy in France. memory. Arlen was one of the great innovators: Dig underneath any Porter lyric, no matter how his Cotton Club songs blended blues with Tin sassy or sharp, and you'll find surprisingly el- Pan Alley; his Wizard of OZ was one of the first egant music. When he returned to America in film musicals to make song an integral part of the 1930s, his art polished, he found his great- the development of character and plot. The est success writing for Astaire and Merman, and sound of Arlen is the sound of America learning his Broadway masterpiece came in 1948, with to sing proud. Kiss Me, Kate.

COLE PORTER (1891 -1964) BOARD OF DIRECTORS Music trivia time: Mary Beth Koehler, President; Gerald B. Fischer, Vice Cole Porter's life resembled Hoagy President and Secretary; Donald Davies, Treasurer; Margie Ankeny; Dixon Bond; Arland D. Brusven; James L. Davis; Carmichael's in that both men: Thelma Hunter; William L. Jones; Tom Larson; John B. a) were born in Indiana Lundquist; Michael W. McCarthy; Carol Lynn Pine; Estelle b) studied law Sell; Nancy Slaughter; Robert S. Spong;' Mary K. Steinke; John]. Taylor; Dale Warland; Teresa Whaley; Arlene Wil- c) died in southern California liams; Billie Young. d) all of the above ARTISTIC STAFF A gold star for Dale Warland, Founder and Music Director; Jerry Rubino, choosing d. Born Assistant Conductor, Pianist, Music Director of the Warland only a hundred Cabaret Singers; Peter Hendrickson, Assistant Conductor, miles from each Music Director of the Warland Symphonic Chorus; Carol Barnett, Composer in Residence. other, and dying practically in the ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF same neighbor- Karen Koepp, Director of Development and Communica- tions; Rosalie Miller, Production Manager; Marlene Bartlett, hood, the two Secretary/Receptionist; Dean Palermo, Librarian; Robert men had broadly W. Pontious, Operations Assistant; Ruth Anderson, Office similar lives. But Volunteer. while Carmichael found early suc- This concert is made possible in part with funds cess as a New York songsmith, Porter fled received from the Music Program of the National Endowment for the arts, a federal agency. America for the life of an expatriate socialite in France. His parties in 1920s Paris were the . This activity is made possible quintessential "anyone -who- was-anyone -was- there" evenings. The crowning touch always came well after midnight when the slick-haired Minnesota State Arts Board, ------.- young man from Peru, Indiana, sat at the throJlgh an appropriation by the •.•• I •.•.I•.•-I •.••.•..

Steinway and Paris fell quiet. Chic and noncha- Minnesota Stale Legislature. _ lant, the songs he wrote just for that evening MINNESOTA STATE ARTS BOARO

8 ~